Not a lion, not a lamb: This March is looking like a penguin. Or a polar bear.

Spring will be late and cool, says the season’s outlook from the Weather Network.

“We’re going to have some very cold air at times, but also some influx shots of warmer air. So, a lot of freeze-thaw action. A pretty nasty March shaping up because of that,” said chief meteorologist Chris Scott.

“It took winter a bit longer to set in across Central and Atlantic Canada,” he added, “but now that it has, it doesn’t appear to want to let go.”

And partly, the unusually cold winter is to blame.

With the Great Lakes mostly covered in ice, it’s harder for the weather to warm up than when they are ice-free. As well, there’s still deep snow on the ground.

And we’re due for more winter storms.

“There’s a heightened threat for significant late season snowfalls for Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, due to the active southern storm track and the abundance of arctic air that lingers deep into spring,” the Weather Network says in a statement.

Scott said that “for a couple of days early next week we’re going to feel pretty good,” but the cold air will keep coming back right through March.

But it won’t be anything like February. That was brutal; March will just be a little below normal, with rising temperatures — just not rising quite as fast as we would like until mid-April.

When we get to the May long weekend, Scott expects we’ll be getting typical highs around 19 or 20 C.

“It’s all relative,” agreed David Phillips of Environment Canada. March is normally about six degrees warmer than February. If this March is cool, it will still be an improvement on February — especially this year when February was some eight degrees colder than normal.

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“We talk about it being colder than normal, but we could still be (seeing) maple syrup weather, where it’s plus four and minus four.” (Sap runs best when the temperatures swings above and below freezing.)

“We’re not going to see a rush to spring,” like March of 2012 when Eastern Ontario almost hit 30 C. “But we see May as really being warmer, and when we get to June, July and August — we’ll probably change our mind but there’s a glimmer of hope that it may be warmer than normal.”

Environment Canada isn’t all pessimism. The department does see near-normal March temperatures west up the Ottawa Valley.

Phillips offered another nugget about our horrible February: It had 20 days with temperatures below -20 C, instead of the average of four such days.

March can still stay cold for a long time. The latest closing on record for skating on the Rideau Canal was on March 25, 1972, another winter that didn’t want to end. That’s so long ago they hadn’t even invented the word Skateway yet.

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